1. The economy & the environment

My project, Econ4, is pleased to announce its new video series on the Political Economy of the Environment, produced in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of economics.

The video above is the first in the series. 1. The economy & the environment. Are people different from pondweed? See below for links to the whole series. For more videos on economics, visit www.econ4.org.

Part One: Introduction

1. The economy & the environment. Are people different from pondweed?

2. Limits to growth – of what? It’s time for a new formula: grow the good, and shrink the bad.

3. Political economy. Who wins, who loses, who decides?

4. Safety, efficiency, sustainability, and justice. What should be the goals in environmental policy?

Part Two: Environmental protection – in theory and practice

1. What is efficiency? There’s more – and less – to neoclassical efficiency than meets the eye.

2. Discounting the future. Are the lives of our grandchildren worth less than our own?

3. The value of a statistical life. How do economists put a monetary value on risks of death?

4. Externalities. External costs and benefits are not the exception – they’re the rule.

5. The Coase theorem. Why private bargaining can seldom solve environmental externalities.

6. The tragedy of the commons. More accurately, the tragedies of open access.

7. Environmental justice. Defending the right to a clean and safe environment.

8. Power & the environment. Costs and benefits weighted by the power of those to whom they accrue.

9. Regulation & environmental protection. Rules as a solution to environmental problems.

10. Incentive-based environmental policies. Prices as another way to solve environmental problems.

11. Market failure & government failure. Democracy versus oligarchy: beyond the market-versus-government debate.
    

Part Three: Global dimensions

1. Globalization & the environment. The globalization of market failure poses new challenges for governance.

2. The environmental Kuznets curve. What happens to the environment as per capita income goes up?

3. Population & the environment. What Malthus got wrong.

4. Tropical deforestation. How transnational alliances can change balances of power.

5. Building natural assets. How poverty reduction and environmental protection can go hand-in-hand.

6. Agriculture & the environment. The costs of industrial agriculture and benefits of ecological agriculture.

7. Cultivated biodiversity. Small farmers sustain some of the world’s most valuable biodiversity.

Part Four: Climate policy

1. Climate change. The defining environmental challenge of the 21st century.

2. Carbon pricing: 1. Why & how? Why we need to put price on fossil carbon, and how we can do it.

3. Carbon pricing: 2. The social cost of carbon. What should be the price on carbon dioxide emissions?

4. Carbon pricing: 3. Revenue allocation. The trillion dollar question: who will get the money?

5. International climate negotiations. No-regrets policies can help overcome myopia and the free rider problem.